The shopper journey starts online for well over 80 percent of purchases of General Merchandise and Electrical products. Online product research used to be confined to a desktop computer or laptop. Shoppers now enjoy the freedom of using multiple devices, whenever and wherever they like. The bias is now heavily weighted towards cell phones and tablets, which provide the shopper with multiple touch points and multiple paths to purchase, all of which must be quick and easy to use. One retailer interviewed as part of this Study remarked that “the retailer is literally in the hands of the shopper”.

Around a third of humanity is now officially online and more mobile than ever before – when organizations start announcing that more of us now own a cell phone than a toothbrush, you know something is going on.

Webs of Influence: The Psychology of Online Persuasion

For companies that own or supply bricks and mortar stores, adopting an omnichannel business approach is widely recognized as the key strategy to meet the demands of today’s shopper and maintain a profit. The challenge is the speed required to organize the resources to provide an informative, seamless and frictionless shopper journey.

Are shoppers’ content requirements channel agnostic?

Many retailers are looking to replicate the rich content and experience of shopping instore, online. The majority of manufacturers are taking an agnostic channel view. More and more, the buying process starts online – often with Google or Amazon. Dependent on the product and the category, the shopper can then visit the manufacturer’s own site and then, somewhere in the middle, in parallel, there could be any number of offline, physical and in-store touch points. Price comparison then typically follows. Increasingly common is browsing online prices while in-store with a mobile device – showrooming. However, webrooming or reverse showrooming is also on the rise – looking up products online, but then choosing to buy them in a physical store.

Showrooming: the consumer’s ability to use your store to confirm their purchase before they buy it somewhere else. And the opposite – reverse showrooming – educating themselves on the web before purchasing the item in a bricks and mortar store.

RE:THiNK: 11 surprising things you should do now to win retail customers in the digital age

The tipping point from browsing to buying often happens wherever the price-value equation is the most attractive. Whether shoppers do it offline or online is less relevant and therefore further highlights the importance of an effective cross-channel, omnichannel strategy and execution.

We know that when somebody touches our product and holds it in their hand and uses it (the experience that they have in-store) that the conversion goes through the roof. The challenge from a digital perspective, and from a content and commerce perspective, is how we translate that online.

Manufacturer

Ecommerce Excellence Study USA: CE & GM 2016

The objective of the qualitative study has been to research and benchmark how retailers and manufacturers view each other in the most important areas of the manufacturer-retailer relationship and to understand what others can learn from best-in-class businesses.

The study has identified those retailers who set the standard of performance as ranked by their trading partners. This has provided benchmarks across all trade channels.

The specific goals of the research are to:

Identify the best manufacturers and retailers, as evaluated by their trading partners.